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Anatomy of a deal: Breaking down the Detroit Tigers' trade deadline challenges

Aside from October, it’s the most exciting time of the baseball season: The July 31 non-waiver trade deadline.

For most of the past 11 years, the Detroit Tigers have been buyers, looking to tweak their roster for another playoff run.

In 2017, however, the team is mired in mediocrity and expected to sell off pieces to build for the future. In many ways, the process started after last season, following a disappointing finish.

Tactical mistake?

At the general manager meetings in November, Tigers GM Al Avila indicated that he was going to slash payroll. The impression was that anyone on the roster was available, but according to former New York Mets GM Steve Phillips, the message other executives heard was that Avila wanted not only salary relief but also prospects in return.

“When Al came out and said ‘We’re going to have to get our payroll more in line with the size of our market,’ then, Al made it clear that what he wanted was high-end talent in return,” Phillips said, “and he didn’t have any expectations that they should have to eat any of the money, considering that Miguel Cabrera is still a really good player, and Justin Verlander should have been the Cy Young award winner … I get it, but it’s not realistic in any way, and it was clear to me that he had no chance of moving any of his players if he wasn’t willing to take on money.”

Phillips, who guided the Mets in 1996-2003 and later was an ESPN baseball analyst, says opposing general managers figured where the cost-cutting edict was coming from.

“That’s from ownership, not Al; how high payroll is going to go, it’s strictly from ownership,” Phillips said. “And it seems pretty clear that ownership made that statement that they can’t continue to live beyond their means to chase that championship, and they were going to become more fiscally responsible, that’s an ownership decision.”

Not surprisingly, the Tigers didn’t make any significant deals over the winter.

Awkward in Lakeland

With Avila’s edict of cutting payroll not leading to any movement, there was a sense of uneasiness in spring training. Who was getting traded? Would it be before the season?

The one player fans focused on was rightfielder J.D. Martinez, who was entering the last year of his $8 million deal.

But Phillips says the front office likely felt an obligation to give the team a chance to get off to a good start and possibly add instead of subtract.

“I think they entered the season hoping they might be buyers instead of sellers in some small way at the deadline,” Phillips said. “With the financial limitations that they did have, they weren’t going to be big buyers, but there’s a thought that Martinez, in his free-agent year, would be playing for a playoff spot, and they wanted to honor that and let it play out before they had any real thought of selling him.”

As the Tigers stumbled around the .500 mark for much of the first half, trade talk was still on the back burner, especially with Martinez missing the first 33 games with a foot injury.

The team fell to 29-30 on June 8 and hasn’t had a winning record since. The challenge for Avila and manager Brad Ausmus is to keep the team focused on the games, not trade rumors.

In his time with the Mets, Phillips would never discuss trades with players, for fear of them holding those conversations against the club.

While the team struggles on the field, Phillips says the front office phone lines are burning up.

Martinez is considered one of the biggest names on the trade market, with reliever Justin Wilson also garnering plenty of interest. The former GM says often one conversation leads to another.

“Al won’t be the one making the phone calls, he’ll be the one receiving the phone calls on J.D.,” Phillips said. “In the case of Wilson, because he’s a low-cost guy, and J.D., because he hasn’t hit free agency yet and is a low-cost player, he’s going to receive phone calls on those players from a lot of teams. And when he’s talking with those teams, they may say ‘Where do you stand on the Verlander front and Cabrera? Would you take on money? Those guys are both 10/5 guys (players with 10 years in the majors and five with the same team can veto any trade), so where do you stand on them?’ ”

This is where it’s time for Avila to show at least some of his cards. A team interested in Cabrera, Verlander, designated hitter Victor Martinez or second baseman Ian Kinsler might say it needs financial relief for some of the remaining salary. Once parameters of a number are discussed, the GMs usually have to ask/convince their owners.

Tigers general manager Al Avila(Photo: Carlos Osorio AP)

Circle of trust

Especially in today’s 24/7 information cycle, it’s critical for general managers to establish a tight circle of trust. While scouts are an important part of any deals, when it comes to throwing around names, Phillips said it’s GM to GM. While he’d share information with his ownership, it can be a slippery slope.

“I never wanted it to get beyond where I was – I wanted to control that, because GMs use owners to be the bad guys,” Phillips said. “(New York Yankees GM Brian) Cashman was the best at it. ‘Steinbrenner won’t let me do that. Steinbrenner won’t let me do that. I can’t do that.’ It really helps the GM to have the owner be the one who says no, because it keeps the conversation going. Once the owners get involved, they like to be the heroes. I never wanted my owner to be in a position to say yes to something I had said no to.”

Phillips’ trusted circle had four people, including his assistants and the scouting director.
He says it’s unlikely that Avila would tip Ausmus off to any trades for two reasons.

The first is that if the Tigers were “buyers,” it would be incumbent on the manager to figure out how to best utilize the new player(s). As “sellers,” any potential return would involve minor leaguers, so Ausmus would be unfamiliar with them and wouldn’t need to be.

Security is the other reason. When Phillips ran the Mets, his manager, Bobby Valentine, was a notorious leaker of information. In 1998, the team’s acquisition of future Hall of Famer Mike Piazza was top secret; Valentine was upset that he wasn’t kept abreast of the situation.

So months later when the team was in heavy talks with Baltimore to trade Carlos Baerga and John Olerud for Roberto Alomar and Rafael Palmeiro, the GM told Valentine, but swore him to secrecy, because Orioles GM Pat Gillick hadn’t discussed the deal with his owner, Peter Angelos.

Valentine leaked the trade to a local writer in New York, who ran the story. Angelos was furious to learn of the deal in the newspaper, and the trade was off.

Lesson learned.

CLOSE

In this July 17 episode of Talkin' Tigers podcast, Anthony Fenech & George Sipple discuss trade values of Verlander & Fulmer, why Ausmus probably should have been let go, then Giants radio play-by-play man and ESPN sportscaster Dave Flemming joins.

Time of death

A main challenge for any organization is to determine when its season is realistically over.

The difficulty is that making that call is subjective – there’s no buzzer that sounds. Where is the team in the standings? How many teams does it need to jump over?

These are questions, says Phillips, a good organization asks itself every day. The Michigan native watches the Tigers closely, and says that time is coming – fast.

“Look, the reality is that the Tigers need to rebuild,” Phillips said. “The money they already have out there is going to become less valuable because the players are getting older, they’ll be less productive, and they don’t have the money to spend over that. So they have to rebuild. It’s a matter of when, not if. And to think that this is the year (to fight for an unlikely playoff spot)? There’s been nothing in the Tigers season so far to say this is the time to go for it.”

Time winding down

In the last days before the deadline, deals can be made or blown up. Phillips says the Tigers probably made their last, best offer to extend J.D. Martinez back in spring training, so it will be time to move.

The hope for all teams is that a trade goes smoother than when Cleveland dealt Victor Martinez to Boston at the 2009 deadline.

Rumors were floating that the Indians would trade one of their franchise cornerstones. But the morning before the deadline, then-president Mark Shapiro called Martinez.

“He said Vic, don’t worry,” Martinez recalled recently. “He told me ‘I went to bed late last night, and there’s nothing going on.’ I was like ‘Yes, I’m still an Indian!’ ”

But by lunchtime that day, Shapiro texted his catcher, telling him to stop by the office when he got to the park. The lifelong Indian was now part of the Red Sox. It can happen that quickly.

As of earlier this month, Victor Martinez said he had not spoken to J.D. Martinez or any other teammates about the trade rumors, so as to not “put any thoughts in their heads.”
Phillips describes the trade deadline as “Christmas Eve.”

“The anticipation of making a deal to help your team is overwhelming sometimes,” he said. “A lot of work goes into making a deal, so it’s rewarding when the deadline finally passes. Then there is new excitement about seeing what the players you dealt for are like, and how they’ll fit in.”

Mike Isenberg is the former coordinating producer at Fox Sports Detroit, where he won 11 Michigan Emmy awards. He has worked more than 28 years in broadcasting, including 10 at each Fox Sports Detroit and ESPN.